We Break It, We Buy It, Part 2

In part one of this article, we looked at the old adage, “you break it, you buy it,” placing it a modern-day context referring to what humanity has done to the planet…and ourselves. We’ve clearly broken it – badly – and “all the kings horses and all the king’s men” probably won’t be able to put it together again, even if we had the will.

It’s not that many of us can’t see the apparent irreversible damage we’ve done, but that not enough people woke up before it became too late to do anything about it. Even if it isn’t too late, we’re still not doing anything about it….anything that matters, anyway.

That’s what has kept it from getting fixed.

We’re much too busy making money, conquering the planet – its countries, its peoples, its creatures, its resources – spying on anything and everything, being lied to and believing it through the manipulation of the news to suit the objectives of world domination and empire to be bothered with what’s really going on. Oh, yes, and don’t forget watching Dancing with the Stars, or whatever drug of choice we happen to latch upon to dull what ever is left of our senses. God forbid we should feel something. Or think.

We now live in a world where the police are more dangerous than the criminals, where psychopaths no longer terrorize just minorities, and governments are clearly no longer “of the people, for the people, and by the people.” Democracy is dead and the drama between the left and right is nothing more than incompetence and political farce where it appears only fools can gather power. It keeps us separate and points at the “other side” as the enemy, and we’re so busy fighting each other we can’t see what the real problems are.

Well done.

Foolish us. We are the enemy. We let this happen and we have no one to blame but ourselves. We went to sleep…we went to sheep. We got soft. We stopped thinking…and now, we’re pretty much f***ed.

In her Article, “How science is telling us all to revolt,” Naomi Klein tells the story about how in December of 2012, a geophysicist and complex systems researcher named Brad Werner from the University of California, San Diego, took a group of 24,000 earth and space scientists through an advanced computer model presentation titled “Is Earth F**ked? Dynamical Futility of Global Environmental Management and Possibilities for Sustainability via Direct Action Activism.” They were attending the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, held annually in San Francisco. The bottom line was clear enough: global capitalism has made the depletion of resources so rapid, convenient and barrier-free that “earth-human systems” are becoming dangerously unstable in response. When pressed by a journalist for a clear answer on the “are we f**ked” question, Werner set the jargon aside and replied, “More or less.”

Ms. Klein closes her article by saying “It’s not a revolution, but it’s a start. And it might just buy us enough time to figure out a way to live on this planet that is distinctly less f**ked.”

Her point suggests there’s time to make a difference and that it can still be fixed. Okay, let’s look at that: How many of you think a sufficient number of us are going to drag our bloated bodies out of our comfortable easy chairs away from processed foods and watching “Doomsday Preppers” or “American Idol” to create the revolution she calls for? As Paul Craig Roberts states, “The American population of the past, suspicious of government and jealous of its liberty, has been replaced by a brainwashed and fearful people, who are increasingly referred to as the sheeple.” He continues:

The Wall Street Journal, being an establishment newspaper, has to put it as nicely as possible. The bald fact is that today’s cop in body armor with assault weapons, grenades, and tanks is not there to make arrests of suspected criminals. He is there in anticipation of protests to beat down the public for exercising constitutional rights.

It’s easy to blame our soul-eating drug-of-choice dealers: the ones who fed us our pathetic educational system that says it’s OK not to think, the fodder of TV and movies, infomercials and celebrity-based consciousness that says “gotta have this to be happy,” and the ones who have created the fear we live with today…but in the end, it’s not them, it’s us. We let this happen.

Hospice for Humanity

Have we irreversibly broken and damaged the planet to the point where it will no longer support human life in the next couple of decades? More and more scientists are coming to that conclusion, and even if they’re wrong, how much time is left before it turns true? When do we start? We’ were warned as early as the late 1800′s, and with a lot more urgency in the last 40 years, significantly increasing in the last decade. When will we start? Today, next month? Next year? In five years? Ten?

It’s not unusual that a recent conversation with a friend turned to the state of the planet. She’s been involved with some serious family issues that have taken the majority of her time, and wanted to know what’s going on with the world. I watched the blood drain from her face as I spoke of the ramifications of climate change and Fukushima. She asked in disbelief if I was serious. She then asked “what are we to do?”

Ah, there’s the question, isn’t it? How do we live in the face of even the possibility of Near-Term Extinction (NTE)? What are we to do? Can we change it? Is there time? Is the will there?

If we can save it, this is what needs to happen.

Immediately begin the 20+-year shutdown process of the 400 or so nuclear power plants on the planet. If we somehow manage to survive Fukushima – the jury is still out on that one – we have learned that we cannot control the technology. During this process, we pray that we don’t have an accident removing the spent fuel rods, or an EMP or economic event that results in the loss of power to these plants. We need a global effort to clean up Fukushimap. TEPCO is not capable of it. An accident with the rods could kill almost 300 billion people in a matter of weeks. Improper shutdown of 400 reactors is a death sentence for the planet.

De-Populatuion: This is one red hot potato, a dammed of you do, dammed if you don’t option, where – either way – a lot of people are going to die. The end of civilization as we know it.

We also need a global effort to clean up the oceans. Without them half of our food supply is gone. It doesn’t matter if it’s economically feasible. What does matter is that we’ll burn more fossil fuels than the cleanup will save, further exacerbating the ocean problems. Again, dammed if you do….

Methane gas: The release of methane gas means our habitat is going to change to the point where it will no longer support human life. We can’t stop it without cooling the planet and that’s not going to happen. Game over.

By now you know I’ve purposefully misled you as I listed the previous bullet points, trapped you. Like a growing number of others, I no longer believe that humanity will survive what’s coming, what’s already started, what’s irreversible, and that brings me to the title of this section, Hospice for Humanity.

Optimists that we are, we mostly keep referring to the prophecies about the changes on the planet in positive terms like The Shift, Transition, The Great Turning….and we tend to largely poo-poo prophecies like 2012 and the Apocalypse. Our belief systems are governed by our worldviews, and how each of us will respond to what’s coming will depend a lot on our worldview and how attached we are to them.

“It doesn’t matter if you think you and/or humanity have 5 years, 50 years, a thousand years, or a thousand millennia, the task before us is the same….or at least, it should be.”

Those are the lessons of all the great wisdom traditions throughout humanity’s brief stay.

In the end, It all comes down to we broke the planet, and now we’ll have to buy it. So much beauty and so much suffering. Let’s hope we die better than we lived.

9 Comments

izzy
on November 5, 2013 at 3:43 pm

That collective editorial “we” makes the discussion even more detached from reality. Some of us knew from the beginning, some of us are just waking up, some of us actively engineered the problems, some of us resisted along the way, most of us are still just going on with business as usual, but so far “we” have never been wholly unified on anything, and that will likely remain a constant as it all unwinds. As nature has amply demonstrated, the process of natural selection works through individuals, not groups. Some of us may well die better than we lived. Don’t count on universal compliance, however.

The real WE here is that all of us will be affected by the ways “we” have individually participated in creating our current predicament. As you mentioned, some groups will die better than we have lived. It’s time for us to learn how to die with consciousness and intention.

“It doesn’t matter if you think you and/or humanity have 5 years, 50 years, a thousand years, or a thousand millennia, the task before us is the same….or at least, it should be.”

……….

What utter nonsense, this quote. It insults both our intelligence and our sense of virtue, meaning, value…. And it should!

I belong to a culture that IS NOT mainstream American culture, but it is a culture, nonetheless. The marginalized “sub-“culture to which I belong is comprised of bits and pieces of both modern and premodern traditions, but we who are members of this cultural tradition utterly abhor the nihilism of those members of the dominant world culture which values only the present while dismissing empathic relatedness with beings of the future. For us, beings of the future are as real and valuable / important as any of the present.

It may be said that we have an obligation to the beings of the future. And that is true. But, fortunately, it’s much better than that. For the ethics of obligation is but a child’s plaything, a stepping stone toward human maturity — after which the awakened human heart serves all of life–present, past, future–beyond the implied guilt and shame and fear of “obligation”. Think of obligation as training wheels for ethical children. Think of compassionate and loving service to life as the mature and awakened state of the human being.

Not to love the beings of the future, and to serve them, is to be asleep and less than fully human. We of the marginalized and oppressed world culture, minority that we may be, understand this. And we find the above quote to be reprehensible.

“It doesn’t matter if you think you and/or humanity have 5 years, 50 years, a thousand years, or a thousand millennia, the task before us is the same….or at least, it should be.”

In case I wasn’t clear above, the problem with this quote is that it implies that what we should be doing–and how we should be living–now should be evaluated on the same basis even if we all have but five more years to live — even as a species. What this implies is that we should forget about forethought, planning, responding to the world as if we might have seven or seven hundred generations ahead of us.

This is a brutal thing to say in the face of the creative challenge we’re all facing! It’s madness, really. And it’s nihilistic.

James,you have entirely missed my point, and it may be more my fault than yours. When you say “Think of obligation as training wheels for ethical children. Think of compassionate and loving service to life as the mature and awakened state of the human being,” I couldn’t agree more.

I am talking about the awakened heart, feeling love, joy, and compassion that does look forward 7 generations even if we’re looking at the last one. If nothing else, we find our selves in a conundrum that offers us a chance to find our true humanity. You may have already found that in your sub-culture, but the vast majority of the world has not, or we wouldn’t be facing these problems. And if you think you don’t participate in the culture you rail against, you might want to take another look.

I also said the article that the quote you so dislike appeared in that, “The opportunity before us in the face of NTE is to discover our deepest humanity.” It is an “are an opportunity to go deeper, to find more meaning, and to understand who we truly are.” If you think that’s nihilistic and that I think life is meaningless, you have really missed my point.

Thank you Gary. One (erroneous) response to the reality of NTE is the assumption that if one accepts its reality, one becomes nihilistic. Nothing could be farther from the truth. For me, NTE makes my life even more urgent, compelling, AND meaningful.

I’m treating “NTE” as an hypothesis, not an established fact, or even an overwhelming probability. That said, I completely agree that it is a real risk. I take it very seriously. But I don’t think a careful look at all of the available data shows that it’s inevitable.

I don’t believe that one must necessarily be a nihilist if one has concluded from their examination of the available data that we’re screwed regardless of what we may do in an attempt to avert the worst. And I do believe that one can only act on the basis of their orientation to the issue at hand. So I am not faulting either of you for your choices of response.

I do think we’d be needing something very nearly akin to a miracle to avert the worst. But that miracle would likely have to arise within our collective hearts and minds, rather from afar. And I think it needs to be cultivated deliberately.

I’m just not ready to quit on it, on us. I’m not living in hospice. I’m among the many who are “hitting bottom”.

Great! Good for you. Celebrate hitting bottom because the only place to go from there is inward and into the arms of loving community, whether that be human community or the earth community or both. As the old time 12 Step people say, “I didn’t quit; I surrendered.”